


His Name is Grant

by DestielsDestiny



Series: Finding Grant [1]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012), Green Arrow - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Slade, Deathstroke Returns, Episode Tag, Family Feels, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Good Slade Wilson, Hurt/Comfort, Mayor Oliver Queen, Missing Scene, POV Oliver Queen, Protective Oliver, promises kept, texts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-06
Updated: 2018-01-06
Packaged: 2019-03-01 03:24:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13285956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DestielsDestiny/pseuds/DestielsDestiny
Summary: Missing scenes from Promises Kept. Oliver has typed out most of the text before he pauses to really think about the absurdity of what he has written. Even with Deathstroke being a thing of the past, one does not invite Slade Wilson over to dinner by text.





	His Name is Grant

Slade watched absently as Oliver finished wrapping fresh gauze around his burned hand, his eyes unfocused. A deep laugh suddenly bubbled up from his chest, startling Oliver out of the miasma of confusion and terror he’s been swallowing since the grenade went off, nearly taking half of Slade’s skin with it. 

For a moment, the bang echoing in his ears, Oliver was twenty-two again, begging Slade not to die. For a moment, the terror of it choked him, even as grief and anger simmered up from their carefully sealed box. This man murdered his mother. 

Those feelings of fear, of terror, of concern, belong to another time, another life. Oliver has no idea what to do with them in this one. 

So he resolutely keeps wrapping up burnt fingers, and waits for Slade to enlighten him about what is so damn funny. 

“This is not how I pictured you and Joe meeting.” Oliver pauses in reaching for the surgical tape, and utterly fails at not sounding as young and vulnerable as he feels. 

“You pictured us meeting?” Slade keeps his gaze resolutely on his hands. 

“Yeah kid, all the time. On the Island.” Despite everything that has happened, Slade is the only person alive who says it like Oliver does, like it was more than just a random place where he was stuck for a while. 

Oliver finished taping the gauze in place, and swallowed hard. 

“What were we doing?” It takes more courage then he knew he possessed, those four words. 

Slade gazes at him as if he’s just been handed a benediction from the Pope. 

“Playing football, mostly. It’s what Joe and I used to do, only…” Slade’s face slides from wonder to irony to grief in a matter of seconds, his son’s name stumbled out of his lips as if, for just a second, he’d forgotten the events of the last few hours. As if Joe was still Joe. Oliver knows the feeling. He used to do that all the time, after the Island. Still does, some days. 

Oliver plunks down on the bed next to Slade, and somehow finds it within himself to sound bright and happy. “Only, we didn’t have a football.” 

It takes longer than he’d hoped, but not as long as he’d expected, for Slade’s mouth to twitch, for the bed to shake with the force of that deep, slow, barking chuckle that used to be the only bright spot in Oliver’s cold and tiring and desperate world. 

Tentatively, Oliver leans into Slade’s shoulder, his own chuckle a weak but real addition to the gale. He feels the moment Slade’s muscles freeze up, feels his own breath catch in response. And neither of them relax precisely, neither of them hug each other or even so much as move a companionable arm around the other’s shoulders. 

But they stay there, like that, touching but not touching, until the laughter fades away, and all that is left is the absence of tears. 

00

Clearing matters with the Kasnian government is depressingly easy. Oliver suspects being the mayor of a relatively minor US city should not carry this much weight…well, anywhere outside of said relatively minor US city. And yet. He’s not sure if he should hope the real reason for the sudden cooperation is how forbidding he and Slade still look, despite there best attempts to scrub, scrape, and rapidly hide the blood and soot clinging to stubbornly to their general deportment. 

It’s either that, or Star City has an even more depressingly notorious reputation than he had previously realized. 

The fact they both positively wreak of smoke and burnt explosives adds just enough credence to theory A to give Oliver some hope however, so he just nods politely and beats as hasty a retreat as possible, Slade a stunned weight hovering at his back. 

For the first time in nearly ten years, that weight feels right, somehow. Something that has always been missing, but now, somehow, almost feels welcome. 

Oliver barely suppresses a shudder at that thought, his mother’s blank eyes starring back at him for a moment. 

“You alright kid?” Slade is close enough that the words rumble right through Oliver’s aching back muscles. He was getting too old to throw himself out of third story windows minus Kevlar. 

Oliver feels something warm trickle down his collarbone. He never could lie to Slade. Deathstroke, yes, with difficulty. Slade, not a chance. 

He suspects the intervening decade has done little to change that. 

“What did Joe say to you, before…” Oliver trailed off, his attempt at deflection a little too gauche and raw upon reflection, and how was he ever planning to finish that sentence really? After your son tried to blow you up? Really? 

Slade huffed, somehow sounding more fond than angry, and slung a careful arm around Oliver’s shoulders. Shifting their weight to walk beside each other, he starred resolutely into the darkness of the night, his words as flat as Oliver had ever heard them. 

“He told me he had a little brother. My other son.” Oliver felt his jaw drop slightly. 

“Who he apparently killed, on his mother’s orders, so he would never have the chance to meet me.” Oliver blinked. And blinked again. And… Yeah, he was going to be sick. 

Much later, watching Slade attempt to wring water out of a hotel facecloth, his head tipped back against the cool bathroom tile, Oliver found the energy to ask something more. Something that seemed important, somehow. 

“What’s his name? Your son?” He deliberately doesn’t qualify the statement. 

Slade pauses in his wringing for but a moment, but his eyes, when he turns to Oliver, are as haunted as he’s ever seen them. And that’s saying a lot. 

“My youngest son’s name is Grant.” The cloth is rough on his skin, but the cool water feels heavenly, and there is a gentleness to the gesture that Oliver never realized he had ever noticed enough to miss, back on the Island. 

Youngest. Not younger. Oliver will ponder the significance of that for a long time to come. 

00

Oliver is on his tenth line of laboriously texted characters, silently cursing the manufacturers of such devices because honestly, had they ever actually attempted to type anything involving full sentences and periods into one of these things? 

It is when he pauses to consider whether adding sincerely it acceptable in a text that what he is doing finally registers. 

Is he really trying to invite Slade Wilson over for dinner? And did he really start with Dear Slade??

Finding the delete button takes more than a moment. At the kitchen table, William shoots his father a questioning look. Whoops, that last curse might have been muttered aloud. 

Oliver flashes William what he hopes is a reassuring smile, and tries again. 

Hey Slade, just wondering how it’s going. And if you maybe wanted to drop by for dinner sometime. 

Yeah, that was so much better. Oliver dropped his head against the back of the couch with a huff of despair. 

“Dad?” Oliver is beginning to suspect that that indefinable something that seizes in his chest every time he hears that word is never truly going to fade. He’s more than okay with that. 

“Is everything okay?” Oliver meets his son’s concerned gaze, his own softening in response. 

He glances at the phone again. His thumbs hover of the keyboard, then peck at it swiftly and hesitantly. 

Tapping send before pocketing the infernal device, Oliver ambles over to the table to rest his hands on his son’s shoulders, planting a kiss on his forehead just fast enough to avoid William’s swipe of annoyance. 

“Yeah kiddo, everything’s fine.” William’s bobbed nod thrumbing through his fingers, Oliver glances at the homework spread out before them, then eyes the X-box hooked to the TV speculatively. 

He bets Slade would be amazing at video games. Oliver blinks in surprise at the thought, not quite sure where to file it in his brain. 

He claps William gently on the shoulders. “What do you say about taking a breaking and watching a movie, huh kiddo?” William tilts his head in consideration. 

“Which movie?” There is suspicion in that tone, but the kind Oliver has often heard teenagers direct at their parents, the kind he used to direct at his own parents when they suggested something they thought he and Thea would find “fun”. 

He suppresses a grin, the send message burning a reassuring hole in his pocket. 

Good Luck.

Oliver ruffles his son’s hair, and finds it within himself to grin with more mischief than is entirely appropriate. “Have you ever heard of Castaway?”  
Later, much later, his son a reassuring weight gently snoring against his chest, Tom Hanks conversing with battered sports equipment on the flat-screen, Oliver feels his phone buzz persistently. 

Thumbing the message up is rewardingly easy. The reply is somehow anything but. 

Thanks Kid. 

 


End file.
